Alistair Cockburn ( ) is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He cosigned (with 16 others) the Manifesto for

Agile Software Development Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to software development, developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented ...

Life and career

Cockburn started studying the methods of

object oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impleme ...

(OO) software development for IBM. From 1994, he formed "Humans and Technology" in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, often shortened to Salt Lake or SLC, is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. It is the county seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. The city is the core of the Salt Lake Ci ...

. He obtained his degree in computer science at the

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a Private university, private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It was established in 1967 by a merger between Western Reserve University and the Case Institute of Technology. Case ...

. In 2003, he received his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

degree from the

University of Oslo The University of Oslo (; ) is a public university, public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation#Europe, oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick Univ ...

. His thesis was entitled "People and Methodologies in Software Development" Cockburn helped write the

Manifesto for Agile Software Development Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented in their ''Manifesto ...

in 2001, the agile PM Declaration of Interdependence in 2005, and co-founded the International Consortium for Agile in 2009 (with Ahmed Sidky and Ash Rofail). He is a principal expositor of the

use case In both software and systems engineering, a use case is a structured description of a system’s behavior as it responds to requests from external actors, aiming to achieve a specific goal. It is used to define and validate functional requireme ...

for documenting business processes and behavioral requirements for software, and inventor of the

Cockburn Scale The Cockburn Scale, also known as the Project Classification Scale, is a method of describing how much formal process a software project requires. The scale was described in Alistair Cockburn Alistair Cockburn ( ) is an American computer scient ...

for categorizing software projects. The methodologies in the Crystal family (e.g., Crystal Clear), described by Alistair Cockburn, are considered examples of

lightweight methodology A lightweight methodology is a software development method that has only a few rules and practices, or only ones that are easy to follow. In contrast, a complex method with many rules is considered a " heavyweight methodology". Examples of light ...

. The Crystal family is colour-coded to signify the "weight" of methodology needed. Thus, a large project which has consequences that involve risk to human life would use the Crystal Sapphire or Crystal Diamond methods. A small project might use Crystal Clear, Crystal Yellow or Crystal Orange. Cockburn presented his Hexagonal Architecture (2005) as a solution to problems with traditional layering, coupling and entanglement. In 2015, Alistair launched the Heart of Agile movement which is presented as a response to the overly complex state of the Agile industry.

Selected publications

*''Surviving Object-Oriented Projects'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, December, 1997, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Writing Effective Use Cases'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, January, 2000, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Agile Software Development'', Alistair Cockburn, 1st edition, December 2001, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Patterns for Effective Use Cases'', Steve Adolph, Paul Bramble, with Alistair Cockburn, Andy Pols contributors, August 2002, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''People and Methodologies in Software Development'', Alistair Cockburn, February 2003, D.Ph. dissertation, University of Oslo Press *''Crystal Clear : A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams'', Alistair Cockburn, October 2004, Addison-Wesley Professional, . *''Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game'', Alistair Cockburn, 2nd edition, October 2006, Addison-Wesley Professional, , .

References

External links

Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cockburn, Alistair Living people American computer programmers American technology writers Alistair 1953 births Case Western Reserve University alumni University of Oslo alumni People from Salt Lake City Agile software development